“It served its purpose”

January 9th, 2012

Via Newsblues this morning comes word of a young reporter with a new job. He’s Syed Shabbir, and the lucky TV station to acquire his obviously brilliant services is KSHB-41-NBC in his hometown of Kansas City (Market #31). He must be brilliant, because he’s only been in the business for two years, having begun in Topeka (Market #136), where he worked for a year before jumping to WCPO-TV in Cincinnati (Market #35) a year ago.

He told Cincinnati.com that working in his hometown has been his dream since the 8th grade, and now he’s made it. He’s a big city kid. Good for him. Bad for the business.

“I came to Cincy, because I needed to get out of Topeka,” he tells Cincinnati.com. “It only took me a year before I got tired of the small market stories and small market pay (in Topeka). I knew WCPO was only going to be a stepping stone, so I only signed a one year deal. It served its purpose, and I guess I’m lucky things are going according to plan.”

According to plan. Yep. That’s the way it is. Along the way, everything this young man did was to prepare himself for his dream, and this is the curse of the ego it requires to “be on TV.” Mr. Shabbir’s concern as a journalist in both Topeka and Cincinnati was for what those stops could do to fulfill this dream, not in serving the community. I’ve seen it a million times. The job reel is more important than serving the news needs of the community. Moreover, these kinds of people who are  just having their purpose served have no interest in the roots of their stepping stones, because they’re not really in it for the news; they’re in it for their own purposes, and one foot is already out the door at the moment the other foot steps in.

A commenter to the Cincinnati.com story, Steve Gaines, wrote: “loved being your ‘stepping-stone’ ….pls feel free to come back to cincinnati & walk on us again in the future…but honestly, i don’t even know who you are..”

I hate this about our industry. It cheapens what we do and robs smaller markets of what they need and deserve. Parochial news coverage wanted by small towns gives way to the cosmopolitan stories that look good on a young person’s reel. The retort, of course, is “pay me what I’m worth, and perhaps I’ll stay.” No you won’t. It is what it is. What you’re worth? Give me a break! You’re not in this for a “living wage” in a small town, because your definition is a better-than-living-wage. You’ll add “who doesn’t want that?” to which I’ll reply “go to law school.”

Maybe I’m the prick here. Maybe I should instead be chiding broadcast companies for not paying people more. I don’t, because I honestly don’t believe it would solve the revolving door problem. Besides, it’s extremely unrealistic economically. These people likely believe that they’re doing the Topekas of the world a favor by loaning them their brilliance for a year or two. Oh. Right.

Moreover, the egocentricity of young news people is an evolution that took place during my lifetime in news management — on my watch. People used to get into “the biz,” because it was a way to make a difference. Today, it’s all about “being on TV” or “being a star.” Watergate produced Woodward & Bernstein, and they became the poster boys for a new generation of journalists and journalism instructors. Shortly after that, trust in the press began to decline. Around the same time, communications schools began popping up to feed the growing beast known as television news, and the industry borrowed from the newspaper paradigm of small-market-to-big-market.

The Personal Media Revolution challenges all this, and I believe the day is coming when communities themselves will grow their own journalists. The Syed Shabbirs of the world — with their 8th grade dreams — will build and study their craft at home and work their ways into positions with local media companies. They will then be people with roots who care deeply about the communities they serve, whether it is governed by geography or issue. That will be good for journalism, it seems to me, because what we have now are gunslingers passing through towns, people generally who are a mile wide and an inch deep (but look good on TV).

Like Mr. Shabbir, they’re serving the purpose of self, and crapping all over the public in the process.

Posted in Broadcasting, Culture, Education, personal media | 3 Comments » |

NYT & union on collision course

December 28th, 2011

I feel pretty sad about the “profound dismay” expressed by former and current New York Times‘ employees due to a decision by management to freeze the pension plan for foreign bureau employees and other “recent developments.” The union sent a petition letter (384 signatures as of this writing) to publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. expressing their concern.

We have worked long and hard for this company and have given up pay to keep it solvent. Some of us have risked our lives for it. You have eloquently recognized and paid moving tribute to our work and devotion. The deep disconnect between those words and the demands of your negotiators have given rise to a sense of betrayal.

A Huffington Post article on the matter by Michael Calderone notes that it could have been worse.

Bill O’Meara, president of the New York Newspaper Guild, said some staffers had considered even “more dramatic” actions.

“There were people who wanted to storm Arthur Sulzberger’s office,” O’Meara told The Huffington Post. “There were people who wanted to stage a walkout.”

The problem here is that this is 1960′s style labor posturing that really feels ancient in today’s media world. I don’t like it anymore than anybody else, but crying for yesterday does nothing to solve today’s problems. Managers of public companies have fiduciary responsibilities to their owners, the shareholders, and people don’t buy or hold stocks in companies that can’t produce growth. It’s not about how much money one makes, nor is it directly about margins; it’s about growth, and there are only two ways to do that. You can increase revenue, which isn’t happening anymore, or you can cut expenses, and that’s what’s happening here.

There’s very little growth in any sector of our economy right now, but this is more than just an economic problem. This is a problem of core business decay, and it will not get any better unless there’s a total reinvention undertaken. The truth and the laws of economics apply to everyone, even a vaunted institution like the New York Times.

What can be done? Take a look at the marvelous work of Lewis DVorkin at Forbes. Here’s a company that has blown out the original concept of making media and replaced it with a much leaner, more nimble and flexible system. The problem, of course, is that there’s no room whatsoever for organized labor’s perspective, which is now simply dead weight around the necks of the people who are trying to save the institution.

But beyond that – and to every individual in media today – the safe harbor that once was “the collective” is no more. It is literally every man and woman for themselves. If your organizations won’t or aren’t able to assist you in reinventing you, then you must do it yourself. I get the letter to the boss, but the arguments are sadly and unfortunately irrelevant. You must take care of you, because nobody will do it for you.

Posted in Newspapers, personal media, Reinventing Local Media | 1 Comment » |

The power of the personal brand (in a social world)

December 22nd, 2011

In a recent Nieman Journalism Lab article on the possibility of newspapers making money by selling ads on Twitter, Justin Ellis notes the successful efforts pioneered by celebrities and athletes. The fact is that the reach of certain celebrities far exceeds that of traditional media companies, so why shouldn’t advertisers pay them instead of media companies to get their word out? Besides, there’s that whole illusion of endorsement thing.

Mr. Ellis says much in a tongue-in-cheek reference to a certain reality show “star.”

Not to mention non-news outlets like, um, Kim Kardashian, for whom pay-per-tweet is a long-standing phenomenon.

Kardashian may be a “non-news outlet,” but she is so only in the sense of a traditional view of “news.” Prior to social media, celebrities required the filter of news organizations in order to be promoted, but much of that is now in their own hands. Are they “media companies?” Of course they are. And just as Wal-Mart has a bigger advertising platform than the New York Times and the Washington Post combined, Hollywood and our athletic fields are cranking out new platforms regularly. It’s into this environment that the efforts of newspapers to play copycat look just a little weak in comparison.

In the last few weeks, The Hartford Courant and The (New Orleans) Times-Picayune have experimented with using Twitter as a new advertising channel. At the Courant, they’ve started offering twice-daily deals to local businesses — think Groupon by tweet — to their followers. The Times-Picayune, more controversially, used Twitter to advertise itself — or at least its website, as the online division of its parent company, Advance Publications, paid New Orleans Saints players to tweet about the newspaper’s relaunched Saints site on Nola.com.

Mr. Ellis notes that the hashtag #spon, which appears at the end of some tweets is a “semi-legible indicator of a sponsored tweet.”

“A Twitter search for #spon is an enlightening look,” he adds, “into what sorts of companies are paying people to tweet: at the moment, Verizon, Clorox, Pepperidge Farm, and Q-Tips.”

I like what Advance Publications did in employing NFL celebrities to promote its website, but the use of a mass media Twitter news stream is problematic. It’s is a part of what I dubbed “unbundled advertising” in a 2005 essay about how to make money in the unbundled universe of the Web. It was written prior to Twitter.

If unbundled media is where we’re headed, then unbundled advertising must necessarily follow. This is a scary concept, however, for there is no command and control mechanism or manipulable infrastructure in the unbundled world. The upside, though, is that it costs very little to participate. All that’s necessary is the release what I call “ad pieces” into the seeming chaos of the Internet, where other businesses will take those pieces and reassemble them when summoned by customers who are trading their scarcity for information they actually want.

So while I fully support the concept here, we need to go back to the comparison with Kim Kardashian to understand why media companies using this particular application — in their own streams — is suspect strategically. The problem is that Kim Kardashian is a real person; The Hartford Courant is not. Ms. Kardashian’s brand is personal and as transparent as a reality star can be. Followers and fans connect with her on a visceral level. They experience emotions in their vicarious relationship with her. When Ms. Kardashian tweets for a sponsor, there’s an inference that she wouldn’t try to “fool” her fans. The endorsement also benefits her directly, and fans understand, accept and appreciate that. The few seconds it takes to “see” the endorsement isn’t wasted; it supports a real person with whom fans are connected.

Moreover, the purpose of following a celebrity on Twitter is different than the purpose of following a news organization’s stream. For Ms. Kardashian, it’s about the connection. With The Hartford Courant, it’s about the news feed. To the former, therefore, a sponsored tweet is about the person, but to the latter, it’s about noise, an interference. A sponsored tweet in the midst of a stream of news is an interruption. It’s, well, advertising.

Nevertheless, it’s good strategic thinking, because it gets us into the world of unbundling, where aggregation is the real value proposition. We’d do much better, however, if we would take up the challenge of developing the personal brands of our news people and helping them create the relational types of connections with fans enjoyed by others with celebrity. This would directly conflict with the core value proposition of mass media — the maintenance of a sterile stage from which to place advertisements — so it’s not likely a concept that media companies will enthusiastically embrace. Moreover, media companies think of employees as “theirs,” so the idea of trumpeting a brand that might one day quit and go elsewhere seems counterintuitive. This is, however, precisely the kind of thinking we need to employ, for today’s media is increasingly unbundled and social, and people follow people, not institutions.

But Mr. Ellis nails the real problem. “Newspapers,” he wrote, “are trying to insert themselves as a middleman in a medium that doesn’t require one.” He’s right. With the possible exception of aggregators, there’s just no market for middlemen online. Advertising is the new content king, because they can place that content directly in front of people in the same way we can. The people formerly known as the advertisers are now competing with us for the same eyeballs.

It’s a battle we’ll lose, because they have the money.

Posted in Advertising, Culture, Journalism, personal media, Reinventing Local Media, Unbundled Media | 1 Comment » |

Big ad money shifting to promotions (and away from media)

December 7th, 2011

Advertisers are now media companies themselves, and as I tried to point out in my last essay, we now find ourselves actually competing with them. The evidence of this is everywhere, but media companies simply ignore it, because the only thing we can see with advertisers is, well, advertising.

For as long as I have known Gordon Borrell, we’ve both been saying that the ad category to watch — due in large part to the disruptive nature of the Internet — is what Borrell calls “Promotions,” the spending of marketing dollars on things other than traditional advertising. So dramatic has the growth been in this category — and what’s projected to come — that the gouge it takes out of advertising budgets won’t be a small bite.

“This was no boating accident; this was a shark!”

Borrell Associates is a research and consulting company that’s driven by data. Once each year, the company produces major trend reports and then tracks those quarterly. Its latest data about the Promotions category is incredibly revealing, especially as it relates to growth.

In an email exchange with Kip Cassino, Borrell’s research guru, he noted that for some time, far more has been spent on promotions than intermediated advertising and that this trend is not only continuing but accelerating.

Most of it is money — five cents off a can of peas at the supermarket, or $2,000 off the next new car you’ll purchase. Discounts, deals, couponing, loyalty programs all share one thing in common: they are vehicles for enhancing sales with the promise of savings.

Promotions have another thing in common as well. Their ROI is immediately apparent. If a store owner puts a coupon on his website or in the daily paper, he knows exactly how much business it brought him — no guessing about “engagement,” or reach and frequency. This appeals to most businesses, especially the smaller ones.

Online promotions have lagged online ad spending, but Cassino says that is changing as well. “With the burgeoning popularity,” he wrote, “of mobile devices — the phones and tablets — online promotions will see massive growth during the coming five years.”

He noted that most businesses don’t separate promotions from advertising, so spending on a website or social media strategy is just “advertising” to them. The ramifications for media companies are stark.

“As overall spending on the intermediated (ad) side of marketing continues to decrease,” he wrote, “these media outlets will either have to learn how to gain revenue from the promotional side or face growing competition for a shrinking revenue pool.”  The result, he added, will resemble “a continuous game of musical chairs.”

Most media companies, Cassino noted, simply ignore the situation. “They note incremental growth on the ad side,” he wrote, “and see no reason to look at where most marketing growth is really occurring.” This is true, he noted, for both legacy and online players. Education, said Cassino, is the first step.

Promotions are not merely an extension of advertising. They have been invisible to many media outlets for decades, because they are primarily tactical tools — the province of the brand or product manager. They are top-line, not bottom line, oriented. Almost any media can find a good spot in promotions, but to do so requires a thorough knowledge of how and when it makes sense, and how it is best applied.

The invisibility is most obvious when it comes to the online world, where, as noted, we’re now competing with the people who have the money. More and more companies are spending promotions dollars on social media, for example, because it really delivers for them. According to Borrell’s latest SOCIAL LA$R™ (Local Ad Spending Report) research, businesses use the following metrics to determine success in this area (in this order):

1. New Customers
2. Additional Fans, Friends, Followers
3. Increased Visits to Business website
4. New email contacts
5. Increased Sales volume
6. Increased Visits to Business Social Network pages
7. Lead Generation
8. Increased Tweet Responses

National advertisers are way out ahead of local businesses, as the below graph shows, which ought to look like a big, fat opportunity to everybody.

When you examine these numbers, it’s pretty clear that businesses — remember, they’re the ones with the money — are now functioning exactly as we function. They are using tools that used to be ours alone, and the energy powering the movement to personal media (which includes businesses) is both abundant and renewable. Our goals are virtually the same as those of business-turned-media-companies, but the problem is we’re still counting on them to support ours. That is not going to last forever.

The opportunity we’ve always had is to use our knowledge and skill to advance this phenomenon and find our new value therein. There’s growth written all over this, and it begins with eyes to see it.

If you haven’t already, I encourage you to read my latest essay, Social TV and Second Screens: To What End?.

Posted in Advertising, Broadcasting, Newspapers, personal media, Reinventing Local Media | 2 Comments » |

Podcamp Dallas: “The Great Horizontal”

October 16th, 2011

My thanks to Mason Pelt for this photo from my session on the Personal Media Revolution (a.k.a. The Great Horizontal) Saturday at Podcamp Dallas. The idea that we’re all media companies is just beginning to take hold in our culture, and it’s going to get a whole lot worse/better with the help of toy companies getting into the media-creation-for-children business.

And thanks to Ross LaRocco for this snippet of video from the presentation. I’m referring to Jay Rosen’s concept, the Great Horizontal:

I’m grateful for the opportunity to speak. Thanks to Mark Ramsey for arranging the whole conference. Well done, Mark.

Posted in Culture, Disruptions, personal media | 1 Comment » |

Occupy is our Babel

October 7th, 2011

I would have tweeted this, but it’s too long. The Occupy Movement reminds me of this verse from Genesis 11 and the story of the Tower of Babel. Theologians have used it for centuries to help children understand why we speak different languages, but the word “language” has many meanings, including any manner of expressing thoughts.

God is the speaker:

“Look!” he said. “The people are united, and they all speak the same language. After this, nothing they set out to do will be impossible for them!

Come, let’s go down and confuse the people with different languages. Then they won’t be able to understand each other.”

Fast forward to today, and substitute the status quo for “God.”

Now you have an idea of what lies ahead.

While we’re at it, I might as well ask where “the church” is in all of this? Do they come down on the side of the people or the institutions?

The answer might surprise us, but not really.

Posted in Culture, Disruptions, Economy, Networked World, Occupy, personal media | No Comments » |

Police and cameras on a collision course

August 3rd, 2011

The inevitable conflict between people with cameras and people in authority is heating up, and news organizations need to be doing more than just paying attention. This is one of those sticky issues between the personal media revolution and traditional media, because one’s perspective on the matter determines where you stand. If you’re a “member of the press,” you enjoy certain freedoms at crime scenes, etc., and your concern about the rights of everyday citizens is limited to whether their pictures or video are of sufficient interest to warrant insertion in your own work. If you’re an everyday Joe with a camera, your interest is more self-driven, but both groups are heading for a showdown with authority sooner or later.

The real sore spot is when that which is being photographed is authority operating outside their authority, as in the case of overzealous cops beating the crap out of somebody. You can apparently take all the pictures you want on a public street, unless the subject in the viewfinder makes law enforcement look bad.

In an utterly chilling report from independent news source Alternet.org, reporter Rania Khalek writes: “More and more people use their smartphones to record police misconduct. But laws against wiretapping are being used to intimidate and stop them.” If the public is the new media (I’ll get to that in a minute), then our culture has a serious problem on its hands.

One would think the fear of videographers on every block would be a powerful deterrent to police misconduct. However, legislatures are not taking this newfound power against police abuse lightly. In at least three states, it is illegal to record any on-duty police officer, even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists. The legal justification is usually based on the warped interpretation of existing wiretapping or eavesdropping laws with statutes against obstructing law enforcement sometimes cited.

Illinois, Massachusetts and Maryland are among the 12 states where all parties must consent for a recording to be legal. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested and charged with a felony.

…The most pernicious prosecutions to date have taken place in Illinois, where the sentence for recording a police officer is considered a class 1 felony — on par with a rape charge — and can land a person behind bars for more than a decade.

These cases are, of course, thrown out of court, but that hasn’t stopped the arrests. Police have argued that they need protection from all these cameras, because it might inhibit officers from doing their jobs in the field (here, here, here).

Khalek’s article is worth reading, because it references many current and past cases and reveals a growing tendency on the part of police in several locations to confiscate the cameras and phones of onlookers in the name of seizing evidence.

In Miami Beach on Memorial Day weekend, 12 cops sprayed Raymond Herisse’s car with 100 bullets, killing him. Herisse was a career criminal who police say tried to run over officers with his car. The police then seized and destroyed cameras and phones. One man, Narces Benoit, removed the SIM card from his phone and put it in his mouth. When his footage was later aired by CNN, police were caught in their lies about what went down.

CNN is an interested party in all of this, because of the huge success of its iReport unit. In a recent interview with Beet.tv, Lila King, Participation Director at CNN Digital and longtime head of iReport noted that contributions of citizen reporters have become “core of he the way we tell big, breaking stories.” iReport has 800,000 citizen reporters around the world, but those in the U.S. face ridiculous charges, if they cross the acceptable line with local law enforcement.

And, of course, citizen journalists aren’t the only ones subject to the overzealous behavior of cops. Last Friday in New York, Suffolk County Police arrested a freelance news photographeron obstruction charges when he refused to stop video taping police. Police say the charges will be dropped, but the point is that, again, legal authority was used to inhibit the gathering of news, and this must concern us all.

This issue is only going to get worse, and ultimately, it’ll be up to Congress and the courts to figure it all out. The law of unintended consequences is waiting in the wings, however, as governments try to press their need for authority over this in public. The First Amendment is the “first” for a reason, and in the age of its writing, it protected those who bought ink by the barrel and those who printed their pamphlets any way they could.

We’ve entered a new age, the depth and reality of which is being revealed more and more with each passing day. People with cameras will take pictures, and the truth is we NEED them to be taking pictures. Yes, there needs to be a few rules. Yes, there are privacy issues. Yes, authorities need to be able to do their jobs. In the end, however, there’s simply too much at stake for all this to play out without the input of professional media companies. Here are some thoughts about what we can do.

• Each company needs to make a quality decision about whether the rights of citizens to photograph or take videos at news scenes is something we wish to support. Assuming the answer is “yes,” then we must get involved, in the courts by filing friend-of-the-court briefs and at the legislative level, both locally and nationally.

• Local media properties would be smart to be proactive in the matter. Have meetings with local officials to determine their wants and needs and encourage their participation BEFORE it becomes a problem in your market.
• Involve the public in the effort and solicit their participation through social media or otherwise.
• Own the story. This is something that impacts anybody with a smartphone. What ARE their rights? If we want their pictures and their videos, we need to make sure we’re publicly supporting their actions.

In this country, the right to report news isn’t reserved only for elite professional organizations, despite the reality that we’ve operated that way for a long time. We want and need to stay as far away from “licensing” as possible, for who then would report on those providing the licenses? Times have changed, and there’s no going back. The best we can do is adapt, and in this issue, that means getting involved.

Posted in Journalism, Legal, personal media, The Great Horizontal | No Comments » |

Professional Journalism is its own worst enemy

July 2nd, 2011

I’m angry.

Professional journalism will never save itself unless it gets off its pedestal. Since this is a nearly impossible human task, I have no hope that the answers to forces destroying professional journalism will ever come from inside the institution. It’s just not going to happen. We have seen the enemy, and he is us (but we can’t admit it).

I come from a unique class of television professional journalists, having worked in the industry both before and after it was taken over by corporations, corporate lawyers, shareholders, and the rules of being a profit center. I can honestly say that it was all about gathering the news before (see my 1998 essay “The Lizard on America’s Shoulder“), but it drifted to the industry of managing audience flow afterwards.

This was brought to mind this morning after reading yet another Chicken Little account of the collapse of professional journalism, and I need to point out a few things (again). “Without professional journalists,” wrote Tom Glaisyer and Sarah Stonbely for CNN.com, “who are paid to keep citizens informed and politicians honest, the very health of our democracy is in peril.” This statement is absurd on two grounds. One, professional journalists aren’t paid to keep citizens informed and politicians honest. They are paid to help their owners make a profit. That’s not cynical; that’s simply the truth. Two, and this is the most damaging, the people, the audience whose trust they assume, know it. Puh-leeze!

That which is important has taken a back seat to that which is easy and that which will attract, for the core mission of any business is to make money. In today’s business climate, things are really problematic, which applies even more management heat to control costs and earn more, more, more. The bottom line runs everything, and those who write stories warning of dire consequences for journalism and democracy are not examining the facts and, therefore, simply demagoging for attention. C’mon, people. Read the signs. People are sick to death of what we’re feeding them, and they’re revolting. That’s the problem, not our precious mission.

Once again, here’s the Gallup data. We’re at an all-time low in press trust. Note that the decline in press trust began in 1976, not 2000 or 2004.

Glaisyer and Stonbely’s piece (which you should read, BTW) concerns the FCC’s recent report on the state of the news, specifically television. That, of course, they govern, but the problem is much deeper than just TV. Moreover, the FCC report is highly biased, because the government has the deep pockets voices of the Telecom industry tickling their ears about using those public airwaves for broadband. Nevertheless, the article drones on about journalism.

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, it is impossible to ignore the inequalities created by changes in media or the harmful effects of the loss of journalists, newsrooms, and oversight. Local communities are suffering from a vacuum of relevant local news and accountability in news coverage.

I’d argue that the opposite is true and that communities are beginning to be served as never before — from the bottom up — by people who aren’t bound by the same corporate necessities of the pros. If I lived in Lewisville, a neighboring suburb near me, I’d be VERY grateful for the work of Steve Southwell, for example. Steve’s blog, whosplayin.com, has kept the heat on a school board that needed heat and has since been largely replaced by informed voters. How were they informed? Steve. Is he a professional journalist? He makes enough money to pay for his hosting, so I guess so. Did he go to school for it? No. Does he work for a big media company? No. He simply performs, as Jay Rosen, Jeff Jarvis and many others call “acts of journalism” that have resulted in elected officials being held accountable.

Steve’s not alone. This is taking place all across the country, mostly in small ways so far, but journalism is alive and well in the U.S. Only the fatted calves of corporate journalism are being whacked.

The Great Horizontal is responding to the Gallup numbers, because they know that we’ll never do anything about it.

Posted in Blogging, Citizens News, Disruptions, Hyperlocal, Journalism, personal media | 1 Comment » |

LeBron James: A media company with a PR problem

June 15th, 2011

We’re all media companies these days. Technology has given us that. It’s the “Great Horizontal” as tagged by Jay Rosen, that hyperconnected universe of individual publishers and broadcasters.

Famous people have taken notice and find that being their own media company has its benefits. Remember how Ashton Kutcher became the first celebrity to hit a million followers on Twitter in 2009? That’s a drop in the bucket these days. Ashton found that he could “talk” directly to his fans with Twitter, and he’s been very smart about it. Athletes, politicians, singers, musicians, artists, poets, authors, anybody can take advantage of the tools of personal media to get their word out, for free.

But as traditional media companies can tell you, there are certain responsibilities that come with the power to address a BIG group of people, because intentions don’t communicate, only behavior. This is especially true when people can react to that behavior and share it with everybody else. It may be easier to protect the stages of big media, but that begins with a very basic understanding about that stage’s responsibilities within the bigger picture in order to keep people coming to watch your production. Being a media company is a responsibility before it is a mouthpiece, because the audience is the one who makes the decision whether to accept the message or not.

This is why most media companies specialize in public relations. Hell, it’s the flip side of the coin of journalism, and we all know that’s true. We’re all selling something, be it a story, a point-of-view or — and perhaps especially — ourselves.

As athletes go, LeBron James is a pretty strong brand, but he has a serious personal image problem. He’s got natural gifts that we’ve never seen before in one package, and that has been hyped since he was a boy. Unfortunately, his image doesn’t match his behavior, and rather than work on that, James continues to make one foolish PR mistake after another.

There was promising championships for Cleveland and not delivering. There was “the decision,” which was so wrong in so many ways. There was the big stage presentation where he was “introduced” in Miami, sort of a celebration before the victory. There was the anticipointment generated by promising “not five, not six, not seven…” championships. What a boneheaded thing to say. He’s referred to himself as “King James” in text messages. Now there’s the haughty and condescending snub of basketball fans who had the temerity to criticize him during the NBA Finals.

“All the people that were rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day, they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. I’m going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that.”

He’s about to enter unchartered waters in terms of forever screwing up the gifts he’s been given, and no course correction is going to help him. That’s because Life is the author of character, and in personal media — when it’s just you — you can’t turn to a “team LeBron member” for advice before opening your mouth. It’s either in you to say the right thing, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, don’t worry. Life will teach you, but only if you have a teachable spirit. You can’t play a role, read a book or take a course. Humility is its doorway, and that’s buried deep within the human soul.

As a huge fan of the Dallas Mavericks, I’ve watched as the national sports media has had a field day with James’ performance, while the superior basketball team picked apart the individual talents of the Miami Heat. Somebody wrote that James can’t experience failure, because he doesn’t know what it is. That’s an apt description of a character defect so enormous that it spills out into his efforts to control the message.

I teach my students that it’s all about your personal brand, and that to behave ethically these days demands a vast understanding of the big picture and their role within it. That includes responsibilities. There is no set of rules to memorize, absent, perhaps, the Golden Rule, that perfectly fits every situation, but we must always remember that everybody’s watching.

There are both benefits and opportunities in the Great Horizontal, but perhaps the most important thing is this: you simply cannot hide your real self, if you wish to play within this realm. There are no failures of talent, only character. My advice to LeBron is to work on that; the rest will happen automatically.

Thanks to Twitter follower TJ (@TJ2016) for the inspiration for this piece.

Posted in personal media, Social Media, Sports, The Great Horizontal | No Comments » |

Personal branding continues to advance

May 11th, 2011

Poynter asks this week, “How important is your brand?” It’s the thing that really matters today and a question about which I’ve been writing for many years. Jason Fry’s question is based on the reality that people read articles these days or watch videos, not sections of newspapers or TV newscasts.

The age of the individual brand was inevitable, a natural consequence of the way digital media has remade our reading habits. In print, columns have a home on a section front or on the opinion page, but online the basic unit of reader consumption isn’t the section or page, but an article — or a video or podcast.

Jason is absolutely right, and the world of individual brands is far different than the one traditional media has known all these years. The reason media companies don’t go down this path is a fear that by empowering their employees, they lose control of them. That’s understandable but of questionable leadership logic in the new world. Fry also offers “four questions to consider that might help you fix the value of your own brand against that of your institution:”

1. Are you someone’s habit?
2. Where is the value of your stuff accruing?
3. Does the institutional brand mean more to you than you think?
4. How hard are you prepared to work?

Fry notes that the issues for traditional media companies are trickier and offers “four ways to build better bonds between your institutional brand and those valuable but potentially irksome individual brands:”

1. Identify your most valuable individual brands (and take care of them).
2. Turn centrifugal force into centripetal (tending to move toward a center) force, or at least balance them.
3. Make your individual brands into institutional gateways.
4. Get really good at building brands.

Jason has some really good advice here, but there’s much more. As traditional media companies, we tend to use applications such as Twitter and Facebook to “broadcast” notifications to our followers. That’s missing the point, and personal branding is a big part of how and why.

George Siemens, Founder and President of the research lab Complexive Systems Inc., published an interesting story on, among other things, the reasons people tweet. Notice that it is almost entirely about personal branding:

a) to express agreement
b) to express outrage
c) humour
d) social grooming (I have an iPad, I met person X today, I went for a run, I ate fruit for breakfast)
e) self-promote
f) raise awareness – general information sharing about topics that might be relevant for network members

As institutions, Twitter is one of the ways we tell people to come look at our content, but people don’t follow institutions, not really. They follow people, and so reporters, anchors, anybody that uses Twitter, must realize that the application is more a personal branding mechanism that you think and that we should all be using it accordingly.

Jason Fry’s Poynter article rightly points out that media companies should “get really good at building brands.” I strongly second that recommendation, even if it may seem like we’re setting ourselves up for future problems. The winners tomorrow will be those who aggregate the winning personal brands in the community, and the sooner we get to working WITH that, the more secure we are for our tomorrows.

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